Toby was an artist who came to Minnesota after discovering that New York City didn’t suit him. “From that point on, I never questioned whether she was more beautiful than I was.” Terry saw that she was also beautiful-a loved and joyful body, playing in a lake.ĭecades later, Terry was teaching at the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis. Because water is about buoyancy, and buoyancy is about who you are as a human body,” she says. “I recognized that she and I were not the same kind of beautiful but that water lifted both of us. One day in the lake, she looked down at her legs and saw the Sunbeam girl - and herself.
At a nearby lake, Terry would crawl into the water until she could float and then swim. So her mother would put Sunbeam bread bags over her casts and seal them with duct tape. In the summers, Terry often had surgeries and afterwards wore casts. Terry was not that girl - not blonde, no braids, no strong legs. On a billboard in her Kentucky town, she saw the pretty blonde Sunbeam girl pumping a swing with her strong legs, braids flying. At that time, most people with spina bifida went through surgeries to get you as ‘normal’ as possible rather than get you as functional as possible.”Īs a little girl, Terry admired the girl in advertisements for Sunbeam bread. I’ll give it to Mama, no matter how many surgeries I had, it was never to fix it. “My mother thought I was the best thing since sliced bread. “Fortunately, I grew up in a family who fell in love with my body before I even knew I had one,” Terry says. Her parents were told to send her to an institution called the “spastics’ home.” But her mother wasn’t having it and insisted that she would go to public school, which she did. As a child in the 1950s, Terry had no legal right to go to school.
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